The common sentiment behind audience and many critical reactions to Primer—Shane Carruth’s laborious, intense new sci-fi tale of physics and time travel, is that ‘It doesn’t seem to make sense. Or wait a minute—it does make sense, and maybe I just didn’t get it. Maybe I need to see it again or read up on it. But yeah, overall I think it was good. I mean, from what I could tell anyway.’

The $7000, Sundance 2004 Grand Prize Winner tells an intellectually rigorous science fiction (emphasis on the science), head-trip of a story that I never quite got, even when I thought I was. It’s the kind of film that unspools with atmosphere and tension, but the serpentine plot is so baffling and obscure, loaded in technical geek-speak and complex scientific ideas made nearly inaccessible by the filmmakers, that it’s a tough pill to swallow. It is, however, at times an undeniably fascinating vision of an accidental discovery, and a cautionary parable about dangerous technological innovation.

It’s a dark film that tells the story, I think, of some upwardly mobile computer geeks whose suburban garage experiments inadvertently produce a dangerous device. They spend their spare time, late evenings and waking moments playing with the principles of energy and physics, and the film’s first half-hour expertly captures their brainy tenacity with swirling energy cloaked in mystery. Two of the men handle marketing, while the others are the science guys.

The scientific duo—Aaron (director Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan), ultimately create a mysterious machine that is beyond control, with the terrifying, promising potential to revolutionize the world as we know it—economically, scientifically, technologically—and harboring an unfathomable power to time travel (from a U-Haul storage space, no less). Their plan? To begin using the time machine to get rich by going forward in time for stock information, then traveling back to make smart investments. What they don’t factor in is that with each, increasingly frequent trip—they are repopulating themselves and creating carbon-copy "doubles," altering the space-time continuum.

It’s a dangerous proposition, and once they start cloning themselves the process and plot get very muddy—we’re never quite sure where we are in time, whether we’re watching the originals or the doubles, and what the story is trying to do, which gets loose of director Carruth and becomes an increasingly frustrating brain-teaser that I’m not sure ever comes back around to any universally understood logic. The final reel is nearly incomprehensible in one viewing, and that is not effective storytelling.

I liked Primer’s energy, mystery and suspense. It builds an atmosphere of techno-dread that’s darkly absorbing, even when you don’t know just what the hell is happening in the narrative.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.